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Originally Posted by Lord Raiden
...Now all I got to do is figure out what dishes to try making now...
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Some simple dishes are yakisoba, tonkatsu (pork cutlet) and curry rice. They take a bit of work but they are hard to mess up (I still don't get that endlessly recurring anime joke about someone cooking the food badly, it's just not possible!). They don't require too many expensive ingredients either.
Yakisoba is a fried noodle dish. The noodles are available fresh or frozen; they come with little bags of spices to mix into them. You can fry up some of the noodles with some chopped cabbage and maybe other vegetables, and add some meat or seafood if you like. Don't add too much stuff in there unless you have a really big appetite -- the serving sizes for the noodles are very large.
Tonkatsu is awesome IMO. I like breaded pork chops and these are the best breaded pork chops on Earth. The only thing you need are the special Japanese bread crumbs (panko) and some okonomi or tonkatsu sauce. And some pork chops, egg and flour of course. The pork chops should be really thin so that they cook through in a few minutes.
Just do a full breading of the pork chops, using the panko for the last step, and fry them about 4-5 minutes a side (maybe less). I like to fry super hot but it's easy to burn the crumbs that way. The trick is to get the pork cooked before it dries out. If you got this in a restaurant it would be served on cabbage slices 1/2 inch or so wide, with a bit of the sauce drizzled over it, with some rice on the side. It's also served as a combo with...
Curry rice! Curry rice is awesome! Go get the little box of cubes of curry roux, it's easy to make. There are usually instructions in English on the side of the box. It's a matter of browning some meat, sauteing some carrots and potatoes, and stirring up the glop made out of the roux with some hot water. Then you just cook it awhile until everything is tender.
If you use the whole box of roux at once you are going to have a lot of curry rice -- it might be best to cut the recipe in half if you don't have a lot of people to feed. And it's OK to use a little more meat and stuff than the recipe calls for, as it is a little stingy with the meat. Adding the potatoes and carrots is optional but it comes out much better with them than without.
For tonkatsu and curry rice you will need to make some nice sticky rice. Get a nice fresh bag of short-grain rice. You have to rinse it up in a bowl, rubbing the grains together, before cooking. I like to put the rice in a large strainer and then put that in a big bowl, it saves some nonsense when changing the water and draining the rice.